


I Would've Been a 'Veronica'

by dunedinparsley



Series: End of Year Cleaning (2019) [2]
Category: Heathers (All Media Types)
Genre: 1980s, Canon-Typical Violence, Genderswap, HIV/AIDS Crisis, Homophobia, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:48:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21829234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dunedinparsley/pseuds/dunedinparsley
Summary: In which 'Heathers' happens but Veronica and JD are gay men and Martha is a lesbian woman, in the midst of the Reagan-era AIDS crisis.This draws from aspects of both the musical and the film. Content warnings in note before text.
Relationships: Jason "J. D." Dean/Veronica Sawyer
Series: End of Year Cleaning (2019) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1567225
Kudos: 13





	I Would've Been a 'Veronica'

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redgoldblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redgoldblue/gifts).



> content warnings: canon-typical violence and murder (non-explicit); canon-typical suicide (non-explicit); sex scene (non-explicit); homophobia against women and men (explicit); AIDS phobia (explicit); serophobia (explicit); manipulative and abusive relationship (explicit); attempted rape (non-explicit); bulimia (non-explicit).
> 
> aka, I'm officially concerned at how many of my works are tagged 'unhealthy relationships'.
> 
> Dedicated to redgoldblue not because she will particularly enjoy this angsty mess but because she introduced me to Heathers three years ago, so really this is all thanks to her! Probably not what you planned upon taking me to the show, but here we are nonetheless. love u xoxo
> 
> 'End of Year Cleaning' is a series of WIPs I have started in the past years which I aim to pull out of the cupboard, dust off, finish as best and as promptly as I can before the year is over, without fussing about editing or making things as good as I want them to be, because that's never going to happen. So they may be slightly messy but at least they're here. I started this fic in January 2018, the draft coming to 1000 words, and wrote the rest in the last three days.

"What would your name be if you were a girl?” Martha Dunnstock asked, bouncing on the balls of her feet, paint-covered overalls hanging off her shoulders.  
  
Alexander Sawyer bit his lower lip, practically sucked his chin into his mouth. The rain was coming in through the flyscreen, but the two children sat there anyway. Martha was munching loudly on apple slices, juice dripping down her front and onto the play-mat.  
  
“So _o_ o _o_?” she prompted, little chunks of apple flying at him. He liked Martha. She didn’t mind being very silly, and he often felt very silly. The Others weren’t being as silly as they once were, but Martha was always bubbly and nice and had funny things to say, so they _always_ played together at break times.  
  
“My Mum and Dad told me once...” He bit his upper lip that time, clenching his little fists into balls. “I would’ve been a ‘Veronica’.” Martha giggled and offered him an apple slice. He took it with a smile. “What if you weren’t a girl?” he asked, echoing her sprays of apple chunks.  
  
“I’m not a girl!” she said, and very nearly took his apple slice back.   
  
“Oh.” He stared at his hands, and at her legs. “Okay!” They giggled and sat a little closer, devising all the ways they could rename themselves, remake themselves, create something new.  
  
***  
  
“Dyke,” came the spit on her face, just as,  
  
“Faggot,” was whispered in his ear.  
  
He had the plausible deniability of glam, but Martha fulfilled everything of a stereotype of a lesbian woman the school cohort had ever seen. Still sporting coveralls, short hair a mess, fat, too loud in class. Alexander was probably the only person in the world who knew how much she loved ‘The Princess Bride’, and even then he had been threatened into silence with death.

How she managed to be so brave he had no idea. The odd thing was, she had never said to him that she was a dyke, though she knew he was, indeed, a faggot. Everyone else was just guessing about him. Sometimes Martha would look at Heather Duke and he just knew that she was remembering their sleepovers, the times _they_ had watched ‘The Princess Bride’ together.

Then Kurt or Ram would shove them up against lockers or bag hooks or open doors and the illusion fell from her face.   
  
He fantasised, sometimes, about holding her hand and kissing her cheek before classes, about going to prom and being childhood sweethearts, but it wouldn’t work. The students had already decided their role in the school, and that was canvases. For bruises.

***  
  
Alexander knew just enough about psychology to know he wanted to study it, and that Heather Duke’s bulimia wouldn’t kill her – just make her more of a bitch. She had the sound of vomiting down to an art, and the way she clutched the side of the bin, or the toilet, or the sink, or the gutter. He wasn’t putting any concerted effort into remaining unnoticed, but the three of them were so self-absorbed in their performative truancy that they didn’t notice him half-way up the staircase. He had asked to go to the bathroom but really he just wanted to stop having spitballs directed at him from the back of the room. He could use excuses of architecture or bowel motions for the time he was taking, but it wasn’t like anyone gave a fuck if he was present or not. He should have been writing out his homework plan for the night, but he took some odd comfort in the Heathers sniping at each other. He let his head loll to the side and felt his hair catching in the snags of the brick. Maybe he’d look less gay if he cut it, he thought. At least so it wasn’t wavy anymore.  
  
“Heather!”   
  
What a familiar shriek.  
  
“Heather!”  
  
A deeply displeased teacher to a nation of three who were all too willing to go to war.  
  
Gagging. Faked.  
  
“And… Heather. Why aren’t you in class?”  
  
“Heather wasn’t feeling well. We’re just helping her!” drawled Chandler.  
  
“ _Not_ without a hall pass.”   
  
It wasn’t even a thought process, just an action. He was writing so quickly from sheer memory that his brain couldn’t quite catch up. “Actually, Miss Fleming..!” He skipped down the stairs, trying to look flushed, flustered. “We’re all out on a hall pass. Heather wasn’t feeling well so they came ahead of me – we were just up in History.” He passed the slip over, forcing his hand into stillness. “The committee meeting for Yearbook starts at lunch, and we need to set up before the rabble come,” he said, and tried to perform the conspiratorial chuckle his father had mastered as a politician. Whether the chuckle worked or not, he wasn’t sure, but he found himself alone with the Heathers, Miss Fleming’s heels clicking away.   
  
Chandler snatched the note from him and examined it with a fierce gaze. Her blush was so dark it looked like there was warpaint on her cheeks. “We were all in Biology,” she said. “But this is an excellent forgery.”   
  
The synthesis of their brains kicked in as the other two stood in a perfect unison. “Who are you?” asked Duke.  
  
“Alexander. Sawyer,” he choked out, ignoring the fact that they had all known him since they were five. “I can memorise your timetables!” His voice was cut off. “And I can copy handwriting from a one paragraph sample.”  
  
“Report cards?” Duke asked.  
  
He nodded.  
  
“Income docs?” McNamara asked (not that she needed them, he thought).   
  
He nodded.  
  
“Prescriptions?” Duke added, leaning in close. She looked flawless. He could barely smell the vomit. Chandler smacked Duke’s hand off her own hip. Somehow, that seemed like a dethroning.  
  
Chandler assessed him, the tip of a diamond. “What do you want? You wouldn’t tell us that if you didn’t want anything.”   
  
He was breathing shallowly. They all stunk of different-but-the-same perfumes. “Let me sit with you. For a week. Just… tolerate me, and then people will stop shoving me down staircases.”  
  
The three of them cackled and he got ready to run. “Until Friday, gay boy,” Chandler said. “Three days, and you give us whatever we want.” He felt cold fill him up. Rising water on a doomed fucking boat. “And if you… come out of it… straight, it would be natural.” He froze. He didn’t want her hand to be brushing his anymore. He didn’t want any of them near him. “Heather,” Chandler said, stepping away and turning her back. “Make him pretty. He’s your sort.”  
  
Heather _McNamara_ , to his deepest relief, took his hand and slung her bag over his shoulders. “Come on,” she murmured with a giggle, and promptly pulled him into a girls’ bathroom. 

His hair was cut. He missed having a fringe to hide behind.

***

Three days turned into two weeks and untucked shirts, _not once being called ‘fag’,_ rolled up trousers, _not once being spat at_ , eyeliner and a leather jacket. Even Kurt and Ram acknowledged him, with the tilt of a chin or a bumped shoulder that _didn’t_ bruise. Ram was punching a new student –a handsome boy who came in late to English. He was handling it well, considering Ram’s size and the cheers of the student body. Alexander forced himself to look away. Then he walked away. Then he jolted. Looked back. Forced himself to look away. Walked away.

He was sick to the stomach.

***

Jason Dean sported a black eye and broken ribs like trophies. ‘JD’ was a _James_ Dean look-alike and Alexander desperately hoped that he could be Paul Newberry, even if only for a moment, when James Dean looked at him and promised to kiss him, later, when the world’s eyes were away from them.

Alexander had no reason to think that JD was gay but for the earring, the little silver hoop in his right ear which Ram had so viciously pulled. He had heard that in big cities the side of a man’s earring meant something, far more than simply experimenting with the punks and the glam rockers, but had never been to a place where he could find out if it was true. He watched JD and hope it was true.

“Hey faggot,” Chandler said, pearly whites flashing more like real pearls polished to the shape of bones than real teeth. “We’ve got a job for you.”

Duke stepped in beside him and took his hand. She liked touching him like they were lovers. She found it funny, running her hands through his hair and touching his chest, slipping a hand into his back pocket. “You like that Dunnstock girl, don’t you? How do you feel about making her the happiest girl alive?” Alexander said nothing. “She’s had her big dykey love pitted on me since we were four and she’s obsessed enough that she doesn’t realise it’s never gonna happen. But she’s fun to watch. I’ve written a little invitation. I’d love for you to deliver it.”

The paper shook in his hands.

“This is cruel,” Alexander whispered.

“You got a bone to pick, you can leave,” Chandler said, examining her nails. “You might be pulling on _my_ dick--” Cruel little giggles -- “but it’s your funeral.” It felt like she wasn’t speaking figuratively.

***

He cut his hand in shop class. He didn’t realise until Duke was screaming, screaming as he’d never heard anyone scream, screaming he’d tricked her, infected her, “You fucking AIDS bitch!”

He sat in the stairwell watching his blood pool in his palm. He didn’t think his blood was dirty, but he didn’t even know any gay people – didn’t know _anyone_ he could ask about AIDS. His father still called it ‘GRID’. ‘Gay Related Immune Disease’. Alexander wondered if he was born with it. If the reason he was gay was a gay gene and if that gay gene _was_ AIDS he didn’t know how he couldn’t have dirty blood. But he’d heard whispers it wasn’t true. It wasn’t just homosexuals. Drug users, prostitutes, plenty of women, too – but not the lesbians. Martha snuck out of town, just the once, to go to a lesbian do in the city, and she said all of the women cared, so much, about everything, for everyone – more compassion and more passion in that one room than in their entire town. They wanted to save their brothers in pink arms, stand with them. But their type of gay wasn’t what made GRID.

He once would’ve told Martha about the laughs and the jeers but he felt like the guilt might kill him.

He felt a hand on his back, was ready to shield his face with his arm from a hit, but the hand stayed there as a whole body settled beside him. Silent and smirking, JD took pressed his arm to Alexander’s, still suspended in the air, tilting into him closer ‘til their wrists touched, ‘til their palms touched, ‘til their fingers were curling together. He held Alexander’s gaze in silence as his blood seeped into the crags and crevices of his skin, ‘til it was overflowing beside his thumb. “Best see the nurse, babe. Loathe to see your blood dirtied by this place,” he said. He slid down the steps to his feet as smoothly as he had come to sit. Alexander couldn’t speak. His throat had never been so still. So full. Perhaps with blood. “Look, you’ve clearly got a soul,” JD said, not looking at him. “You just need to work a little harder keeping it clean. We’re all born marked for evil.” Alexander swallowed hard, tried to speak, to query, to beg for answers and beg him to stay. Without looking at him JD seemed to know. “I saw what you did to Martha. Sister in pink and all. Pretty messed up.”

It was vomit filling Alexander’s throat, then. But JD was gone and it was too late to go back and beg for Martha’s forgiveness and too late to beg the Heathers to take it back, and his soul was heavy with evil.

And JD was gay.   
  
And JD had held his hand.

And JD left a bloody hand-print on the brick wall – a pink triangle at the base of the palm.

***  
  


He didn’t take Martha’s calls, heard her excited messages about how Duke might be _just like her_ , and he wanted to die.

***

“D’you think the lezzie will come?” asked McNamara, somehow without malice. She was holding Alexander’s bandaged hand, sucking a lollipop with a childishness that was somehow reminiscent of Martha, too.

Alexander didn’t speak quickly enough. Duke was lying in the backseat, legs tossed over them both. “Oh, she’ll be coming. That letter will give her showerhead masturbation fuel for _months_.”

She seemed so pleased with herself, to know Martha’s body was somehow linked to her own. If Alex were braver he could’ve asked if the promise of the letter would be giving Duke masturbation fuel for months, too. But he never had been brave.

“I need corn nuts,” said Chandler, pulling to a violent stop in front of a 7/11. “Alexander!” she snapped, as if he should’ve known it was an order from the queen.

JD leaned over him in the freezing aisles of the 7/11 with just the same power – no, not power. Something like it. Fearlessness, shamelessness, in every motion, in every tiny touch – and said that no matter where in the country you went, you could always find a 7/11. That a 7/11 would probably be all that survived an apocalypse. “Cyclones in Florida, wildfires in Chicago, blown up towns all over, the Pride riots in New York--” That’s what it was. It wasn’t power. It was pride. But maybe they were the same thing. “--the 7/11 will stay the same.”

Alexander wanted to laugh. It felt like he should laugh, what a ridiculous thing to say, but instead it felt like JD was telling him secrets. Giving Alexander something of himself.

He didn’t think to ask about the blown-up towns until they were at the college, a frat brothers’ house filled with drugs and condoms and those who thought they needed both. But he got an answer to the question anyway. “The new boy, you know? Jason Dean, the one in the faggy coat. He’s Bud Dean’s son – the TNT magnate.”

“I thought it was a construction company?”

“Deconstruction, more like. He blows stuff up. That’s what he does. Even blew up his own wife.”

“No way.”

“Yes way. It’s just a question of if he wanted to blow her up or if she wanted to be blown up.”

Alexander tried not to hear any of it. He wanted JD’s words, everything of them, every horrible secret and truth.

He drank vodka. It tasted of nothing just as the people around him felt like nothing. Waifs of humans. Ghosts already. Drag his tongue up the curve of a frat brother’s abs to take up the salt which burned his bitten lips with Chandler’s hand in his hair, guiding his way. The brother – _Craig –_ promised they could pick it up later, if he wanted. He would’ve fallen into the man’s arms days ago, at any indication someone, some _man,_ might want him, but all he could think about was Martha and her fragile, beautiful heart.

He hid in the bathroom where a couple fucked behind the shower curtain and tried not to cry.

When he came back out Martha was weeping in the centre of the room, Duke’s sparkling pink drink staining her one fancy outfit – a white blouse with lace on the collar, woolen pants actually made for women, curving down her thighs and calves – irreparably. She ran in tears. Alex ran in shame. Chandler called after him. He would claim not to have heard.

***

It didn’t take much to find JD’s house. It was a small town, the rumour mill rife, the housing market slow.

He threw a rose from the garden bed at the window with the blood-red curtains, because he was afraid a stone might break the glass.

JD was bleary eyed and beautiful. He didn’t look brave in just his underpants and a faded t-shirt. He looked like a lover. He looked like every dream Alex had never allowed himself to have.

He guided Alex through climbing up the wall to the window. He said he’d done the same thing a thousand times, coming home late from a Pride demonstration, from a concert, from a poetry reading, from the edge of a bridge he’d chosen not to jump off. He asked if Alexander was the Romeo to his Juliet and laughed against his lips when Alex said he was more like the Horatio to JD’s Hamlet. He pulled Alexander into his arms, against his body, kissed the point where his shoulder met his neck. He asked if that meant they would never get a happy ending. Alexander said that stories were there to be rewritten.

***

They gasped into each others’ mouths. Kissed each others’ hips, knees, feet, hands, shoulders, cheeks.

They were not dirty. They were holy.

***

JD murmured histories teachers would never speak in Alexander’s ear. He talked about Sappho of Lesbos, Achilles and his Patroclus, talked about the golden boy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets that somehow never made it into the English syllabus. They talked about Oscar Wilde and his Bosie, and all of the censorship which meant love stories like theirs they would have to write themselves.   
  
JD told him about a woman named Stormé DeLarverie, a lesbian who refused to be beaten and started the world anew – he whispered of _Stonewall_ and laughed, that Alex had never heard of it, then told him everything he could. The Gay Liberation Front, Marsha Johnson and her vibrant shadow Sylvia. Talked about the Balls where the boundary between woman and man blurred to meaninglessness, where touch was a religion and they wrote their own language because English as they were taught it wasn’t enough. He had never been. But he and Alex could run away together. They could go right then and never look back. Never think of Ohio and the Heathers and the way that children were turned into monsters somewhere along the way again. Alexander laughed in the pre-dawn light because it was either that or cry, and he felt he’d cried enough for a lifetime.

***

JD had a denim jacket with pins from hem to collar. Pink triangles, tiny rainbows, a little lilac lambda (“The Greek language is the language of the limitlessness.”), just the word _gay_ over and over again. And the slogans. They felt like prayers in Alex’s mouth.

"The gays bash back, the majority doesn't exist, out of the closets and into the streets, rainbows reign, silence equals death.”

They were silent. A small death, perhaps. Dying, just for a while, with each other.

They were not going to die. They were gay and they were not going to die. They were going to live and live in each others’ skin and blood and bones and souls.

Alexander wanted to laugh at how pitifully love-struck he had become, but it felt too real to laugh and going too quickly to question what it was to be in love with a boy who was willing to die, what it was to be in love with a boy he’d met last week, to be in love with a boy who unwrapped his bandages and kissed his half-healed wounds.

***

Chandler told his parents he was gay. “You should’ve stayed at the party, baby. I was so scared you just _vanished,_ of _course_ I told your parents about… everything. And _Craig_ would’ve _loved_ to get to know you.”

***

He locked himself in his room until his father threatened to break the door down.

His mother cried.

His father was stone-faced.

He found himself both stone-faced and crying, somehow. Wondered if that was what it meant to have a child, to give a child the worst of yourself.

They said they loved him, they would always love him, and they begged him to reconsider. After all, he was so young. And it wasn’t like he’d ever even kissed a boy. How could he even know?

***

He kissed his boy, his boy kissed him, hidden behind Chandler’s house. They laughed in silence watching Chandler gag over the toilet bowl. The whole house stunk of her alcohol and her vomit and her cotton candy perfume. The excess of gold-plated cups, four TVs, a mirror framed in real silver in every room, made JD scorn. Alex couldn’t bring himself to ask if JD’s family wasn’t rich, too.

JD hid in one of the oversized linen closets as Alexander begged Chandler’s forgiveness and thanked her for telling his parents, implored that she give Alex one more chance to be her friend. She demanded breakfast in bed before she’d reconsider it. He promised her a hangover cure that would change her life.

“Well honey, I came out of the closet,” JD whispered against Alexander’s ear as he poured out cereal and milk. JD’s hands on his hips and their lips close together as they laughed, they could’ve been the married couple of the house – Alexander silently prayed that one day they might be. Not this house in its glamorous horror, but a house full of books and music and love for each other. That would be enough.

***

They watched Heather Chandler die. Blood splattered in her hair, just the same colour as her scrunchie.

“You said it would make her hair fall out,” Alexander whispered through his sobs.

“Well it will, eventually,” JD said, not in the voice of the quiet love of his life, but the harsh tones of a man uncaring for others’ pain, for all the pain that had been done to him. “Come on, babe, we’ve written enough suicide notes in our lives to come up with something,” he said cheerily. “You know that girl’s handwriting inside out.”

***

Through all the announcements and the mourning, the funeral and the mockery, all Alexander could think about was how on earth Duke had gotten her hands on the red scrunchie.

***

JD took him home. It was perfect.

“Hey, son. Who’s your gentleman friend?”

“This is my _boyfriend_ , Dad.”

“Boyfriend, huh? Always knew it, and you know I’ll love you anyway. You gonna come inside for a beer? I’ll make spaghetti.”

“You mean pour spaghetti out of a can and into a pan?”

“Isn’t that what making spaghetti is?”

“Come on, _lover_ , I’ll show you my room.”

“No hanky-panky, not while I’m still in the house, young men!’

But it wasn’t perfect, because the son spoke the father’s words and the father spoke the son’s.

JD didn’t talk about it. Gestured vaguely to a photograph of his mother, who was beautiful and sad and looked just like her son. “What happened to her?” Alex asked in a whisper.

“She died,” JD said shortly.

***

  
Alexander began puking every day. Twice a day, three times a day. Duke slapped his back. “That’s the way, babe, you’re learning!”

***

Martha wasn’t coming to school. She wouldn’t take his calls.

***

As Kurt and Ram held him down with the promise of a good fuck, the best fuck he’d ever get, the fuck he’d been dreaming of, both of them at once, all his dreams surely coming true, he knew that it wasn’t them who’d planned it. It was barely them saying the words. He saw Duke’s face in his mind – or maybe she was really there. He wasn’t sure. He wondered if she’d been raped, too.

He got away.

He twisted Ram’s wrist.

Kurt broke his nose.

Both of them ran in fear as he started to bleed. He spat blood after them and hoped he would die.

He cried on the floor of the nearest 7/11 until the staff forced him to leave, so he drove to the next one, and the next, and the next, until he had no tears left.

JD was right. 7/11 could survive the apocalypse, and it could survive his tears.

***  
  


“They tried to rape me,” Alexander said, because that was the truth.

Duke laughed. McNamara didn’t understand. JD was so still he looked like he might’ve died.

***

Alexander knew they were going to kill Kurt and Ram. He didn’t believe it, couldn’t _think_ it, but he knew it. He paid attention to their handwriting in class, wrote little rhymes and curses in Kurt’s toddlerish scrawl and wrote a filthy limerick to Duke in Ram’s unsteady and mis-spelled hand, so filthy that it made her slap him. He laughed. Who laughed at being smacked and didn’t even ask why?

Alexander didn’t _understand_ what it meant to kill until it was Kurt crying out, “I don’t understand!” and JD shooting and shooting and shooting. But he only hit once. The only ‘once’ he needed to, the ‘once’ at his right temple, where JD would so elegantly smear blood into the guncap, dropped beside him in the grass, Kurt’s fingers still wrapped, spasmed, around the trigger.

Alexander had known them as children. They had known him, too. They had been so small and so beautiful and he was sure that they had all been in love with each other, once. They looked like children again, slumped against each other, each with half the suicide note in hand. They really could’ve been lovers, curled together as they were by the time JD had finished his design. Alexander was still staring at Kurt’s blood on his hands.

He screamed at JD’s hands on his cheeks. He had never smelled so much blood, never seen so much, felt so much. And JD was kissing him through that blood, JD was _hard_ through that blood, JD was holding him like he had held him in bed back when they weren’t murderers, up against a gravestone so old all the words were faded. All that was left was the crucifix of white marble, protruding from the grey, chipped and blood-spattered, and it bruised Alexander’s back just the same with JD so big – had he always been so big? – on top of him.

Alexander screamed and screamed until JD covered his mouth with his hands. “Shh, shh… this is the way it needs to be.”

JD had prepared well. They were only half a mile away from a river. He hadn’t been expecting so much blood, but all the same had packed towels and changes of clothes and pints of rubbing alcohol. All their old things went in a polyester sack marked with BUD DEAN CONSTRUCTION printed all over. “All gone by morning, babydoll,” he said. Alex was getting used to the smell of TNT.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Alexander?” That was somehow worse.

“What if this makes it worse? The… the homophobia.” It should’ve been the least of his concerns, but that was all he could think about. What would it do to all the other gay kids. Alexander was no longer of his own concern. He didn’t deserve to be fought for any more. The Gay Liberation Army did not march for the likes of him.

“It won’t. It’ll make it better,” he said. “We’re building a better world.”

  
“In corpses?”

“If needs be.” JD grabbed Alexander’s wrist and held it to his lips. They stared at each other. They were writing a new language in looking. Their pulses were out of time, perfectly off-beat, perfectly inversed. “Our love is God,” JD whispered against his pulse. “Let’s go get a slushie.”

***  
  


They had lit the world aflame with suicide and “No more killing,” Alexander whispered into JD’s hair. “Promise me?”

He could hear his parents downstairs. They were talking in poorly whispers about whether they needed to put him on suicide watch. Being gay and being friends with Chandler _and_ with those poor two gay boys – really, who would’ve thought? They were probably the only gay people he had ever met, because Martha didn’t count, not really. She wasn’t ‘gay’, per se. They didn’t realise that he could hear them. He had always been able to hear them, but that was his secret superpower. JD shared his superpower and seemed to believe that somehow between their kisses and their sins they could be superheroes that way, together. Alex thought JD’s superpower was his voice, his words, the way he carried stories, poems, lyrics, mantras under his tongue.

JD was quiet for so long that Alex thought he had fallen asleep.

***

JD had been right. Rainbow flags and stalwart pink triangles spread through the town. Alexander’s parents went to a meeting – ‘all anonymous, of course’ – for parents who thought or knew their children were gay. Kurt and Ram’s parents were there as some sick twisted version of special guests. They came home with pamphlets, for themselves and for him (and condoms and lube, but he refused to acknowledge those), and had a ‘proper sit-down chat’ with him about their love for him being genuinely unconditional, and how no gayness was worth his life. How his life was so beautiful and how there was so much more of it to live.

He asked JD if his father had done the same. He laughed and laughed and laughed.

***

The parents meeting came too late for Martha.

“You haven’t heard?” JD asked, like the sweet protagonist of an 1800s novel, reclining in his armchair. “Martha jumped off a bridge.”

Any world that they had been building crumbled down.

“She’s dead?”

“No but she still might, she’s on life support--”

Alex was out the door before JD had finished speaking.

He ran barefoot to the hospital and was tossed out for his bleeding feet. “Can’t have you bringing that dirt in,” said the nurse cheerily.

***

He came back with shoes and with his parents.

He held Martha’s unbandaged hand and told her she needed to wake up, because he needed to tell her about Stormé DeLarverie. He needed to tell her about Pride in New York City. He needed to tell her about his first kiss. He needed to tell her that he loved her. He needed to tell her she was the most beautiful person in the world and that no matter how badly her body might be hurt, the strength of her heart, the goodness of her heart, would carry on. And he would carry her, however she may need.

His father was crying but he said he didn’t know why. Still, he took Alexander in his arms and held him closer than he’d ever held him. “You promise me you never stop loving like you love, my boy.”

His father’s heart ran so much faster than his own.

“I promise.”

***

Duke had started a petition.

**TURN OFF MARTHA DUMP-TRUCK’S LIFE SUPPORT**

It was Alexander throwing his guts up, then – Duke didn’t laugh, she just jeered as he gagged and choked over the cafeteria bin.

JD half-carried him out of the school and to the nearest 7/11. “The world would be better off without her,” he said casually as Alex downed his second slushie – if he were cold enough maybe he’d stop feeling. Or maybe he’d just die. “She deserves to die.”

“Enough,” Alexander said. He’d never heard his voice so low before. Whether from the cold or the vomit or his rage he didn’t know. “We’re done.”

“What?”

“We’re _done_ , I’m done, this is all done! No more!”

***

He wanted JD to kill him, but he didn’t yet deserve to die.

He needed to make something, anything, better, and then perhaps he could die.

Faking his death was a tantalising pull toward what the future could be. Quiet and dark, suspended from the bar of his closet.

***

JD, too, had begun a petition – cosigned by Duke. Alexander had no idea how he had gotten her name next to his and he didn’t care, because he knew there was no way it was real. **STOP TEEN SUICIDE – PETITION AND PEP RALLY.** JD wanted nothing more than teen suicides en masse. Alexander wondered if his own suicide would have quenched some of JD’s thirst.

No one more could die next to his name.

***

The smell of TNT was all over campus. He didn’t know how the others didn’t smell it, feel it in their mouths.

***

Martha was awake. He heard the whispers as he weaved in and out of the crowds, down to the boiler room. She was going to be okay.

***

JD was beautiful and deranged and surrounded by explosives.

Alexander wanted to hold him. He wanted to kiss him and tell him it would be okay.

JD looked back at him and smiled. He didn’t even seem surprised.

They mirrored each other perfectly.

***

He wondered for a moment, holding JD’s hand over a loaded gun, if it would’ve been different had he been a woman. If he had been a Veronica, would JD still have done what he had done? Whether he loved Alexander as a woman, if their being straight would have kept everyone safe, or if he had remained gay and never loved Alexander, if he would have killed at all. Alex wondered, absently, why JD loved him enough to kill, but not enough to stay alive.

Their fingers were together on the trigger. They pulled it together. JD’s blood splattered over Alexander’s frozen body. The gun fell. The explosions never came. Blood smeared over Alex’s lips, into his eyes up his nostrils, down the front of his shirt. For the first time, blood comforted him. Good blood, dead blood, blood he took into himself, blood he would carry forever. JD’s blood on his body, so much that it seemed to account for all of them: Chandler, Ram, Kurt. Martha. The same red as the scrunchie. The scrunchie had _always_ meant blood, whether or not they knew it.

He washed himself in the boys’ locker-room in the stall heralded always as Ram’s – there was a wreathe of white lilies hanging over the tap.

***

The pep rally looked like a carnival of death.

***

He tore the scrunchie from Duke’s ponytail and didn’t care whatever pain it might cause her. Blood smeared through her hair, her hair twined down his arm. He wrapped the scrunchie twice around his wrist, where JD had kissed his pulse and told him they were Gods, and threw his fist in the air. Strands of Duke’s hair bound with Chandler’s fell down the length of his arm, and everyone watched him. Everyone saw him.

“Silence equals death. And there is _no such thing_ as a majority.”

He had no words of his own left. His own words only ever did harm.

He wanted to punch them both, but instead he weaved around Duke and McNamara to stand next to Martha, who looked impossibly small and afraid in her wheelchair. Talk began again. Not a riot, not a caucus of people choosing to change the world they were in, not an outpouring of love. Quiet little talks, passed person to person, man to woman to those in between, and Alexander Sawyer, just for a moment, saw them all.

He wondered if they knew the words they were whispering back and forth were gay ones, queer ones. He wondered if they knew that as they scrawled his words on the walls that they weren’t even his, or that he wasn’t even a person. He was a shell, alive by chance alone.

He put a hand on Martha’s shoulder, watching everyone watching them. She didn’t move. She had always cried in silence. He didn’t know what to say to her. “Maybe we could rent a movie? Something with a happy ending?”

“I’d like that,” she whispered.

***

Alexander pressed his palm against the wall, where his own blood was ink to the pen of JD's hand.

Martha took his hand. They locked their fingers together like they did when they were little, devising all the ways they could rename themselves, remake themselves, create something new.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! :) I hope that you enjoyed it. I welcome and appreciate any and all feedback.


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